Saturday, January 8, 2011

I was working on a kind of intense sweater project earlier, one that I'm not even sure is going to work, and decided to take a break and work on something else for a while. I'd been wanting to make flowers, and I hadn't found a tutorial that I was dying to try yet, so I experimented a little and came up with this. I googled and couldn't find where it's been done before, but let me know if I missed something and I'll link up. I'm pretty sure it was inspired by these felt poinsettia napkin rings that my mom taught us to make in Girl Scouts. I didn't look it up beforehand, but the procedure is stuck in the dusty files of my brain.

So all you need for this is an old sweater, some decent scissors, and a hair clip. It'll only take about half an hour, probably less!

1) You will need to felt your sweater first if you don't have a felted one already handy. It's easy and you can do it at home. That part will take longer than half an hour, though.

2) Take your sweater and cut out three circles: big, medium, and small. The big one should be 2-3 inches in diameter. Whatever size you want, really. You could just do two circles if you'd rather make it simpler.

I have to point out that this picture reminds me of a liquor store.

3) Cut some little slits at the quarter marks of your circles. Then round those out to make petals.

They will stack up like this.

This is what Ivey was doing while I made this and took pictures.

"Cheese!"

"No, no no no."

4) Anyway, cut some little slits where I've marked here. You want to alternate the placement of the slits from layer to layer and be sure the top layer has slits in between the petals.

5) Cut two things shaped like this...

6) And feed them through the holes in your layers.

7) When you are finished, it should look like this.

8) Just turn it over and slide it onto a hair clip, and then fluff it. You could trim some of the petals if desired.

9) Then put it in your hair, or make your child wear it! I can't get either one of mine to wear a flower right now. I probably won't wear it either. Well, maybe. It puts me in a Valentine's Day mood. I'm still turning over in my head all the other things I could decorate with these fast little flowers. Headbands, for one. Bags, wrist warmers, stuffed animals? What else?

Love this! What a great idea. I will definitely be trying these.BTW- if it makes you feel better, Lucy won't keep anything in her hair, either. I'll be putting plenty of bows and ribbons on June before she gets coordinated enough to pull them out as well.